


rinse and repeat

by strider1989



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Intrusive Thoughts, Mental Illness, Self-Harm, Spoilers - No Mercy Route, Spoilers - Pacifist Route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 01:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5028976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strider1989/pseuds/strider1989
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of these times, you'll find a way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	rinse and repeat

It starts out as the little things. The bad habits you pick up, the nervous tics, drumming your fingers and biting your nails. Things you don't even notice at first. Anything to distract you, to keep your mind off of other things. 

It works for a while. Your mind feels clearer. You're more in control of yourself, your hands don't shake so much,

and the last thing thing you see before you reset is Toriel's dust on your hands.

  

 

This time, you tell Toriel you have places to be.

You don't know what you're thinking. Maybe you can protect her. Maybe you can protect everyone else, too, if you stay far enough away, if you ignore their texts, if you don't return their calls.

It's not easy to ignore the hunger gnawing at your stomach. The old bus shelter's roof has holes in it, it isn't enough to keep the rain from dripping through. Your hair is sticking to your skin, and you have to fight the urge to brush it out of your face. Your fingernails have been nothing but stubs for a long time. You chew at your fingers, you scratch at your skin.

You turned your phone off a while ago. It made you feel too guilty when Sans stopped texting you stupid memes and started trying to get you to tell him where you are. 

Toriel left you twelve messages on voice mail. Asgore left you five, and sent you a cute cat video in between.

You bite your nails until they bleed. It's not enough. You can feel static pounding in your skull, behind your eyes. It's not enough.

 

 

Your nails are long again.

When you wake up, you stay like that for a while. There's no need to get up and talk to Flowey, really. Why should you when you already know everything he's going to say?

Toriel won't come in here, though. You've waited for her before, but she never came. She sticks to the script.

So you lay there, on top of your own grave, and you giggle when you wonder to yourself when you ever stopped thinking about yourself as two separate people?

When you finally leave, you wrap your filthy bandage around your bleeding fingers because you know Toriel's not gonna like that. The biting helps for a while but not by much. Your teeth are too blunt, too flat, and you find yourself envying monsters with their long claws and sharp teeth and hard edges, all needles and knives and hurting. Imagine what you could do with tools like those. But instead, you have to leave bruises on your arms where your sleeves will hide them, and you keep the second human's toy knife close to you, always. It's not nearly as sharp as you'd like but you've already ruined your nails.

When you get to your knife, at last, your REAL knife, you nearly want to cry with relief. You practically throw the old, blunt one across the room in your scramble to open its box. 

It's the only thing that helps. Your hands shake as you wash your bandage in Asgore's sink. You're not doing anything wrong. It's the only thing that helps. 

"You will be judged," you hear Sans say, distantly, and you can barely bring yourself to sit through his speech. Maybe you wouldn't be able to, if it weren't for the knife steadying your hand. Maybe you could attack him now, and change up the script a little. You're getting pretty sick of the same old lines.

But he beats you to the punch when he says, "…But you. The only person that you ever hurt was yourself."

You freeze up. That's not what he's supposed to say. You've heard everything that he has to say, you've heard it a million times over, and he's not supposed to say _that._

But he just looks at you, with an expression that looks disgustingly akin to pity. You hate it. You _hate_ it. Maybe you could attack him, after all, just to make him stop. You've got more than a few timelines of half-remembered pain behind you, more than enough to keep you from feeling too guilty about it--

"Kid." He interrupts your thoughts, and you startle, as if out of a trance. Your hands are shaking again, you realize.

"… You've got friends here. You know that, right?"

You don't respond. You can't respond. What would you say, even if you could?

After a few moments, he closes his eyes and you swear you can hear a sigh. "All I'm saying is…be careful in there."

And then he's gone.

 

 

You can't stand to be apart from Toriel, though you don't know which one of you it is that feels like that. Maybe it's both of you. Maybe you just can't stand the thought of being alone again.

She and Asgore don't get back together after all--a thousand different timelines and you've never yet seen one where they do. You still catch yourself nearly calling him "dad".

It gets worse and worse, as much as you tell yourself it's okay. It gets worse, you can tell, when summer rolls around and Undyne makes fun of you for still wearing your stupid sweater even when it's nearly a hundred degrees out. Sans is the only one who defends you. He's still wearing his hoodie, too. 

You're sitting at the dinner table, and you dimly register Sans making some stupid pun, and Papyrus getting mad about it, and Undyne cracking up, and Toriel smiling and shaking her head as she serves you more food, but all you can focus on is the fork in your hand. It's shaking. Are you doing that? There's a ringing in your ears, a static somewhere behind your eyes. 

You hear someone say, "Frisk?" but it takes a few seconds to recognize it as your name. When you look up, Toriel is looking at you with worry and concern. In your peripheral vision you can tell that the rest of the table is, too, and you can't _stand_ it, you _hate it, you hate it--_

"Are you alright, dear?" she asks. You mutely shake your head. She says something about you getting some rest, but you're not listening. Instead, you focus on the way she easily picks you up in her arms, and the way her fur feels under your hands; maybe if you try hard enough, you can hold onto this feeling, the warm cloudiness of being cared for, and replace all your bad thoughts with that, instead. 

You wish it was that easy. If it was, you could've stopped hundreds of timelines ago.

It's dark when you wake up in your bed, and you can smell something like sugar and spices. You must have drifted off. The pounding in your head is worse than ever.

You push the covers off of yourself, walk numbly over to your dresser, and dig around in one of the drawers until you find what you're looking for. Toriel hasn't found your knife once yet, wrapped in socks beneath a pile of clothes you never wear.

There's a deep emptiness sitting heavy in your gut as you clutch the familiar weapon in your hand, and step over the slice of pie she left for you.

The door to your room creaks open slowly when you push it, and tiptoe your way out into the hallway. There's a light still on, for some reason, in the kitchen, but you can't think about that now, you've waited too long for this, you've kept yourself from digging your claws in for far too--

Your hand's on Toriel's doorknob when you're interrupted by a voice behind you saying, "Kid?"

You spin around and instinctively lunge forward. Sans easily dodges to the side, but he looks surprised, saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa--"

You slash towards him again, snarling. His hands are out of his pockets, for a change, raised in a sign of mercy as he dodges. "Come on, Frisk, I'm not gonna fight ya--"

On the third one, he grabs your wrist, and the look in his eyes gets dark. You grunt with the effort of trying to pull your arm free.

He stares you down, his left eye flashing a dangerous blue. "Don't make me do this again. I'd hate to ruin all of Toriel's nice new furniture."

You can feel something unfamiliar welling in your chest, but you can't figure out what it is before you feel something hot and wet streaming down your cheeks.

You're crying. It's been so long, it takes you a moment to remember the word for it.

"I don't want to fight you," you whisper.

Sans' expression gradually softens, and so does his grip on your wrist. "…I know, kid. I know you don't."

You let out a choked sob, and the sensation is so strange and alien and long-overdue that you want to laugh at the absurdity of it. You do start laughing, in fact, and what comes out is a hysterical half-sob that you don't even know how to categorize, but once you start it's impossible to stop. You'd thought you ran out of tears. You feel broken.

"I don't want to fight you," you repeat, a bit hysterically, as Sans pulls you closer and lets you bury your face in his jacket. You hear the knife drop to the ground without realizing you'd let go of it.

"Yeah," he says softly. He sounds a bit broken, too. "I know. It's okay."


End file.
